Former Ubiquiti Employee Gets 6 Years in Jail for $2 Million Crypto Extortion Case
May 15, 2023
Cyber Crime / Network Security
A former employee of Ubiquiti has been sentenced to six years in jail after he pleaded guilty to posing as an anonymous hacker and a whistleblower in an attempt to extort almost $2 million worth of cryptocurrency while working at the company. Nickolas Sharp, 37, was arrested in December 2021 for using his insider access as a senior developer to steal confidential data and sending an anonymous email asking the network technology provider to pay 50 bitcoin (about $2 million at the time) in exchange for the siphoned information. Ubiquiti, however, didn't yield to the ransom attempt and instead looped in law enforcement, which eventually identified Sharp as the hacker after tracing a VPN connection to a Surfshark account purchased with his PayPal account. "Sharp repeatedly misused his administrative access to download gigabytes of confidential data from his employer," the U.S. Justice Department said, adding he "modified session file names to attempt to make it ap...